Stuck with Pound
kirkcenter.org
Stuck with Pound
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Stuck with Pound
#2Sturgeon's law applies to people as well as between people. That's why we invented editors. and manners.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081265
Edit: skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound it seems amazing that one can get from supporting social credit ("to disperse economic and political power to individuals") to capital-F Fascism and "the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Rothschilds" but in an age before social media at least it seems to have taken him on the order of a decade to radicalise.
(on the other hand, Vorticism to Fascism may have been a simpler route? What about the gripping hand?)
Re: Stuck with Pound
#3Sturgeon's law applies to people as well as between people. That's why we invented editors. and manners. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081265 Edit: skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound it seems amazing that one can get from supporting social credit ("to disperse economic and political power to individuals") to capital-F Fascism and "the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Ro…
There were direct connections between Futurism (the Italian artistic movement) and Fascism, and Futurism influenced Vorticism.
Cancelling Pound would be no great loss for humanity.
Re: Stuck with Pound
#4Sturgeon's law applies to people as well as between people. That's why we invented editors. and manners. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081265 Edit: skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound it seems amazing that one can get from supporting social credit ("to disperse economic and political power to individuals") to capital-F Fascism and "the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Ro…
Going from socialism to fascism never was a long walk.
Re: Stuck with Pound
#5Sturgeon's law applies to people as well as between people. That's why we invented editors. and manners. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081265 Edit: skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound it seems amazing that one can get from supporting social credit ("to disperse economic and political power to individuals") to capital-F Fascism and "the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Ro…
There were direct connections between Futurism (the Italian artistic movement) and Fascism, and Futurism influenced Vorticism. Cancelling Pound would be no great loss for humanity.
He may as well have been cancelled, as I'm utterly unfamiliar with him. Will report back on whether I got any useful bits out of "Guide to Kulchur" and "ABC of Reading" after I've read a bit of them.
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sunfish was certainly worth some reflection, although Pound's willingness to translate chinese poetry without knowing much chinese may show his practice (as is most of ours!) was not quite up to his preaching. (Edit: he leads "...Kulchur" by quoting 一以貫之[1], so he is stronger in chinese than I.)
Upon reflection: abstraction and instantiation are always dual, and just as we shouldn't exclusively fly abstract, neither should we exclusively rest concrete. There are more fascinating journeys to be had by skipping between both sides of the duality, passing between them adroitly, adjointly.
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Classics/Volume_1...
Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzQWYHHqvIw
Re: Stuck with Pound
#6Sturgeon's law applies to people as well as between people. That's why we invented editors. and manners. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081265 Edit: skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound it seems amazing that one can get from supporting social credit ("to disperse economic and political power to individuals") to capital-F Fascism and "the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Ro…
Going from socialism to fascism never was a long walk.
You're being downvoted but this is correct.
Mussolini, arguably the inventor of modern fascism, began his political life as a socialist; to his last days, he maintained a belief in the role of the State to direct development and economic output.
In many ways, the economic policies of Fascism (and Nazism later) might well be described as "socialist policies run by - and for - oligarchic capitalists".
Re: Stuck with Pound
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were direct connections between Futurism (the Italian artistic movement) and Fascism, and Futurism influenced Vorticism. Cancelling Pound would be no great loss for humanity.
He may as well have been cancelled, as I'm utterly unfamiliar with him. Will report back on whether I got any useful bits out of "Guide to Kulchur" and "ABC of Reading" after I've read a bit of them. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sunfish was certainly worth some reflection, although Pound's willingness to translate chinese poetry without knowing much chinese may show his practice (as is most of our…
ABC of Reading is a good but extremely curmudgeonly guide to poetry in English through the ages. (He would rather have written a guide to european poetry, and it shows, but his publisher (Faber?) insisted it focus on English for the sake of accessibility.) A large part of it is basically an anthology with commentary. His commentary in it (as elsewhere) is maddeningly condensed and hermetic - one senses the insight within it without always being able to work out what he is saying. It's hard to say who it's for - in some sense it takes the shape of a kind of 'beginner's guide', but he doesn't exactly offer the friendly helping hand a beginner might wish for. No politics, fascist or otherwise, are anywhere to be seen in it.
I haven't read Guide To Kulchur but it seems like it edges towards the 'crazier' (late, fascist) side of Pound.
Re: Stuck with Pound
#8Sturgeon's law applies to people as well as between people. That's why we invented editors. and manners. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081265 Edit: skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound it seems amazing that one can get from supporting social credit ("to disperse economic and political power to individuals") to capital-F Fascism and "the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Ro…
Going from socialism to fascism never was a long walk.
> Going from socialism to fascism never was a long walk.
Ideologically, it's a pretty giant gulf. Mechanically, there are some socialist models that are similar (corporatism is the key similarity there, though not all socialist models embrace corporatism in practice, and fewer do by name.)
OTOH, fascism isn't a long mechanical walk from lots of modern government forms.
Re: Stuck with Pound
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going from socialism to fascism never was a long walk.
You're being downvoted but this is correct. Mussolini, arguably the inventor of modern fascism, began his political life as a socialist; to his last days, he maintained a belief in the role of the State to direct development and economic output. In many ways, the economic policies of Fascism (and Nazism later) might well be described as "socialist policies run by - and for - oligarchic capitalists".
> In many ways, the economic policies of Fascism (and Nazism later) might well be described as "socialist policies run by - and for - oligarchic capitalists".
It would be more accurate to to describe it as oligarchic capitalist policies executed through corporatist institutions (which is very close to the non-Leninist socialist critique of Leninist-style Communism); the similarity to state-heavy forms of socialism isn't socialist policies, but corporatist institutions — that party, state, labor unions, and firms, and any other institutions permitted in society are expected, even if they have nominally separate character, to be coordinated and working together with a unified vision toward a unified goal.
Re: Stuck with Pound
#10Sturgeon's law applies to people as well as between people. That's why we invented editors. and manners. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24081265 Edit: skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra_Pound it seems amazing that one can get from supporting social credit ("to disperse economic and political power to individuals") to capital-F Fascism and "the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Ro…
There were direct connections between Futurism (the Italian artistic movement) and Fascism, and Futurism influenced Vorticism. Cancelling Pound would be no great loss for humanity.
> There were direct connections between Futurism (the Italian artistic movement) and Fascism, and Futurism influenced Vorticism.
This is really rather shoddy guilt-by-association - and second degree association at that.
He's a valuable critic and I am certainly grateful to him for i) turning me onto a number of European poets from times and tongues I would not otherwise have turned my attention to, and ii) for sharpening my concept of what poetry is and should be. I don't know what it means to talk of 'cancelling' a writer from a century ago but not to have his work would certainly be a loss.